YouTube Windows Phone App Blocked by Google as Microsoft Wonders Why

By Justin Sarachik, Christian Post Reporter Friday, August 16, 2013

Google is blocking Microsoft's YouTube Windows phone app for violating terms of use despite working together on an app using HTML5.

"Microsoft has not made the browser upgrades necessary to enable a fully-featured YouTube experience, and has instead re-released a YouTube app that violates our Terms of Service," said a Google spokesperson to Verge. "It has been disabled. We value our broad developer community and therefore ask everyone to adhere to the same guidelines."

Released earlier this week for Windows Phone users, the app began displaying errors, which were due to Google revoking the API key Microsoft was using to reverse-engineer Youtube's ad code.

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"Google is blocking our updated YouTube app for Windows Phone," said a Microsoft spokesperson to Verge. "We are working with them to resolve the issue."

When the app launched in May, Google claimed violation of terms in the disabling of YouTube ran ads, and the app allowing videos to be downloaded.

Microsoft addressed those issues and then looked to re-launch, but Google still had a problem. Microsoft launched the app anyway, to which Google abruptly blocked it.

"Google claims that one problem with our new app is that it doesn't always serve ads based on conditions imposed by content creators. Our app serves Google's advertisements using all the metadata available to us. We've asked Google to provide whatever information iPhone and Android get so that we can mirror the way ads are served on these platforms more precisely," said David Howard, Vice President of Microsoft on the company's site.

"So far at least, Google has refused to give this information to us. We are quite confident that we can solve this issue if Google cooperates, but fixing Google's concern here is entirely within Google's control. If Google stops blocking our app, we are happy to work with them on this, entirely at Microsoft's expense."

Now it is up to Google to decide if Microsoft has complied to their requests.